Vampires

3-27-80

He grumbles about the women he sees at the bar while he sucks on a bottle of Budweiser, a dark man with streaks of early gray in his hair and beard, although he’s no older than we are, calling each woman who walks in “a vampire,” while claiming they only come here to suck men’s blood.

Nobody takes him, too seriously except maybe for the newcomer-younger women who keep asking Tommy, the bartender, why he lets this guy stick around.

Tommy never has a good answer, except to mumble something about “local color,” by which he means, this guy, we call “Aqualung” (after the 1970s Jethro Tull hit) is one of the handful of regulars that keep the bar in business in-between during those slow times weekdays when the bar doesn’t have a rock and roll band to draw customers.

“He keeps me honest,” Tommy says, confusing all but those of us who have heard Aqualung’s ranting for some time, hearing about his time in Vietnam, and how things never quite seemed real when he got back to the states, how he lost his wife to some “goddamn hippie,” and how he could never get back his career after the Army ruined him with the draft.

We don’t feel sorry for him nearly as much as he feels sorry for himself, we just breathe deep and down our drinks, feeling how much luckier we are for having escape, and examining ourselves just a little closer as to why we had, some of us seeing ourselves as one of those “goddamn hippies” that lucked out and wound up with some GI’s girl, and feeling guilty, each of us at some point during the night, buy the poor fool a drink.